Tuesday, January 30, 2007

In the picture above we are in front of a painting that was presented at the Shanghai Biennial of Art in 2006. The painting is based on the perceptions associated with photography, to the extent that the men depicted in the painting appear in a pose usually associated with portrait photography. If we have any doubts about that, just behind these three Chinese gentlemen, you will find another painting depicting a man in the process of taking a photograph of precisely those same three men in the foreground of the painting. Now mind you, you are in fact looking at all of this through a photograph which is the one that is looking at the overall painting. We have the back and forth echoes between photography and painting that is the subject of this editorial.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Deborah Turbeville, you might say, is the anti-Helmut Newton. Her most abiding images, the ‘Bath House’ series, produced for Vogue in 1975 (and reprised in the similar ‘Steam Room’ photographs of 1984), present models whose misty lassitude is the antithesis of Newton’s athletic automata. Turbeville’s early career as a fashion photographer depended precisely on a degree of suggestive blur (first spotted by Richard Avedon) that rendered her subjects – not to say the clothes that were the ostensible pretext for the pictures – so many excuses for conjuring an alluring haze. ‘I say yes to style,’ she said, ‘yes to mood, yes to ambiguity.’ But Turbeville also says yes to Art, and ‘The Narrative Works: Photographs 1975–1997’, the first UK exhibition of her photographs, continued her use of a wide variety of print sizes, rough or unfinished surfaces and scraps of attendant text. ‘I am’, Turbeville has also announced, ‘very avant-garde and extreme.’

They are elastometric cases that protect the camera from all of the bad stuff the earth has to throw at you. The camera armor will also come with Made's palm strap and ergonomic shoulder strap. Sounds like worthy investment if you like to take that big, bad DSLR out in the nature where it can easily get its ass kicked. No word on what models will be supported, but expect all of the popular models to be supported.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

"London, 25 January 2007 – Get up close and personal in a whole new way. With the world’s first wide 18x optical zoom, the Olympus SP-550 UZ accepts no limits, bringing photographers closer to distant subjects than ever before. Capture candid street scenes from a discreet distance, grab the detail of your favourite sport from way up in the stands – then even use the wide angle lens to take in the whole game – as this model’s focal length spans an amazing 28mm-504mm (in 35mm camera equivalent terms)! Enjoy double protection against camera shake with Dual Image Stabilization. Even at high magnifications or when capturing fast-moving objects, this technology ensures results are significantly sharper. Packing 7.1 Megapixels of detail-capturing power, the SP-550 UZ opens up a new realm of creative possibility."

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

MEXICO CITY — They call it el barrio bravo, which more or less translates as "the brave 'hood." But it takes more than courage and a certain ferocity of spirit to survive in Tepito, this tough metropolis' most Darwinian precinct.

Humor probably helps. A sense of camaraderie too. Above all, caution.

Then there's the tremendous pride that Tepito residents feel about their much-stereotyped and stigmatized neighborhood just north of the capital's historic center. Tepito lacks many things — clean streets, decent housing, honest cops — but it doesn't want for a strong self-identity.

"They think they're the best of everything," says photographer Francisco Mata Rosas, 47, "the best dancers, the best boxers, the best cooks."

Ahh, I’ve been planning to write this one for awhile: an entire article on archival quality media. As I do professional software development as well as professional photography (what a weird combination), I need archival quality CD and DVD media to store my data on.

However, one of the hardest things to is actually find good media, or even understand why it is good media. This article focuses on the history of Compact Discs, writable CD/DVD media, and why DVD+R is superior to DVD-R. If you want to just know what media is worth buying, skip to the summary at the bottom.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Jay Cornelius directed this movie about Stephen Shore. Definitely a good watch.

"Stephen Shore is an influential American photographer. Selling his first photographs to the curator of the MOMA at age 14, and photographing Andy Warhol's factory at age 17, he has had a long and distinguished career, pioneering the art of color photography."

Monday, January 22, 2007

In 1932 the young Henri Cartier-Bresson, lately returned from Africa, saw a photograph of African children charging into waves on a beach. “I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks,” he recalled years later. “I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ took my camera and went out into the street.” What Cartier-Bresson produced during the next few years, as the curator Peter Galassi once wrote, became “one of the great, concentrated episodes in modern art.”

The online alternative to the inkjet paper sample book. This is a project of the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). It was just set up and is in a developmental stage, but this may become very handy in the future.

Friday, January 19, 2007

The mouse and keyboard are getting old - but new touch-sensitive screens could give us a whole new way to work with computers. Charles Arthur reports

It's more than two decades since the last computer interface revolution - the mouse - and now the next one is just around the corner. Slightly less than a year ago, Jeff Han, a researcher at the computer science department at New York University, stood up in Monterey at the annual TED (Technology, Engineering, Design) conference, a showcase for interesting new products and ideas, and began demonstrating his new big idea.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Stephen Perloff is the founder and editor of The Photo Review and editor of The Photograph Collector. He has taught photography and the history of photography at numerous Philadelphia-area colleges and universities and has been the recipient of two grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for arts criticism. His articles have been reproduced in dozens of other journals and he has been called on as an expert to comment on the state of the photography market for publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Stephen Johnson is putting together a tribute website for Bruce Fraser who passed away last month. Bruce didn't invent color management but certainly understood it better than most of us and had the ability to clearly explain it. He has written many articles and books. He will be missed.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Tacita Dean’s moving film Presentation Sisters (2005), which portrays the quiet daily rituals of elderly nuns living in the South Presentation Convent in Cork, Ireland, unfolds gradually, tracing a gentle slowness. Their routine comprises communal meals, domestic labour, recreation and devotional prayer, each of which Dean spent months observing. One shot shows a nun ironing sheets, pressing out wrinkles with a determined focus and concentrated thoroughness unknown in the frenetic modern world outside. Used to our culture of light-speed pace and miniscule attention spans, multi-tasked distraction and attention-deficit disorders, one discovers an oasis of clarity in the darkened environment where Dean’s film plays. Capturing the unhurried cyclical time of Catholic spirituality, the piece emphasises the sense of prolonged duration through its anamorphic widescreen format, which widens the 16mm colour film’s image. Time stretches out.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

""This long article is an attempt to address the multitudes of attitudes that have developed over the last six years regarding the use, longevity, and testing of inkjet inks. The first section briefly introduces those products and why it’s important to think about them as art materials. The second section provides an overview of ASTM International’s art materials standards-writing activities compared to those of the International Standards Organization. The last portion of the article discusses the testing of inkjet products, proposes reasons why current methods will not satisfy artists, and how ASTM’s methods will work."

A new book by David Saffir and part of the "Matering Digital" series edited by Harald Johnson.

“Here is a great, new book for the serious color digital photographer. It not only covers how color works, but what you need to know to use it to your best advantage. This isn’t a “how-to shoot color pictures” book. It is a color course on how color works in the digital workspace, how you can use it, how to correct and manipulate it, and finally, how to store it in order to work with again later on. This is a great guidebook for both photographers and artists alike. It covers a lot of what you do not find in many other digital photo books. I Rate it: A ” Review quoted from Apogee Photo.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

By Terry Sullivan @ PC MagazineLAS VEGAS—At this year's CES show, the Korean company Planet82 Inc., which produces a number of nanotechnology products, have been promoting a new type of sensor that can capture images with almost no visible light. By combining features of CCD and CMOS sensor—two of the most commonly produced forms of imaging sensors—the company claims that its single carrier modulation photo detector, or SMPD, sensor functions as an artificial eye by applying silicon photodiode technology and connecting it to nanotechnology. In doing so, it's able to distinguish images in the dark, without a flash. The names of two of the most recently manufactured chips are the PLP-2033B and PLC-3033C.

"Darkroom® written for professional photographers who want to get the most out of Adobe’s groundbreaking Photoshop® Lightroom™ workflow application, and published 8 times a year by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Each issue features in-depth tutorial articles, innovative digital photography techniques, and timesaving shortcuts written by the creative experts behind Photoshop User and Layers magazines."

Photographers and painters have always made self-portraits; doing your own likeness is part of an artist’s franchise. But sometimes the camera’s potential nudges photographers further, encouraging a theatrical impulse: to portray themselves as a clown, or a person of the opposite sex, or even, say, Jesus. That was the case with F. Holland Day (1864-1933), a wealthy and eccentric Bostonian influenced by artists like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Starting out as a publisher of belles lettres, in the late 1880s he began making photographs, and rather exotic ones, at that.

Monday, January 08, 2007

I always had a feeling for Britain. We would listen to the BBC during the war, when I had an uncle Herb who was flying a bomber, which I believe may have been from England.

In 1960, I purchased a Hillman Minx convertible, which wasn't a very expensive car in those days, and drove around England with the top down. It was an American-drive car, which was an advantage because I could snap people on the sidewalk more easily. I also had a sports coat made with the side pockets larger, so I could fit my Leicas in them.